Co-pending application Ser. No. 582,305, filed Sep. 14, 1990, entitled "Multiresolution Digital Imagery Photofinishing System," by S. Kristy, assigned to the assignee of the present application and the disclosure of which is herein incorporated, describes a digital image processing system wherein photographic still images, such as those captured by way of a 35 mm camera, are digitized and recorded on a optical compact disc (CD), for subsequent playback on a CD player. The output of the CD player drives a reproduction device, such as a consumer television set or color thermal printer. One of the key aspects of that system is the manner in which the digitized images are compressed to obtain a storage file format that facilitates both the storage and retrieval of images for reproduction by a variety of devices the resolution of which may vary from device to device.
In particular, when a photographic image capture medium, such as a 24 or 36 frame, 35 mm film strip, is scanned by a high resolution scanner to digitize the respective images that have been captured on the film, each digitized image is subjected to a compression operator that `down-converts` a very high resolution image file, (e.g., 2048 lines by 3072 pixels/line file) into an iterative set of residue image files and a base, or low, resolution file, (e.g. a 512 lines by 768 pixels per line array representative of the image). One example of a preferred compression operator is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,969,204, issued Nov. 6, 1990, entitled "A Hybrid Residual-Based Hierarchical Storage and Display Method for High Resolution Digital Images in a Multiuse Environment," by Paul W. Melynchuck et al, assigned to the assignee of the present application and the disclosure of which is herein incorporated. As described in that Melynchuck et al application, each (512.times.768) base resolution file is formatted as a set of four interlaced (256 lines by 384 pixels per line) image sub-arrays, respectively defined by four sub-arrays of pixels within the 512.times.768 base resolution array, corresponding to odd pixel/odd line, odd pixel/even line, even pixel/odd line, even pixel/even line sub-arrays.
The size of both the base resolution file and its interlaced sub-fields are chosen to facilitate the implementation and incorporation of a low cost, reduced complexity frame store/data retrieval architecture into a conventional CD player, which provides for rapid call-up and display of selected images on a consumer television color monitor. Several preferred embodiments of such an architecture are described in co-pending patent application Ser. No. 583,265, filed Sep. 14, 1990, entitled: "Mechanism for Controlling Presentation of Displayed Image," by K. Parulski et al, and Ser. No. 809,365 filed Dec. 18, 1991, entitled: Storage and Retrieval of Digitized Photographic Images, by M. Axman et al, assigned to the assignee of the present application and the disclosures of which are herein incorporated.
As described in the above-referenced applications, each captured image is digitized by the scanner and stored `as is`, regardless of its orientation on the film. Annexed to each image file is a header file which contains orientation, aspect ratio and other minilab operator-generated information that is readable by the data retrieval microcontroller of a CD player, to control the interfacing of the base resolution data file from the compact disc to a reproduction device (e.g. TV display).
Now although an optical compact disc is a very high quality high density storage medium, it is a write-once or permanent medium; it cannot be erased or altered. Moreover, in order to provide a substantial degree of reproductive flexibility to the user, the contents of the image file and its associated header, as prepared by the photofinishing minilab operator, are defined to optimize predefined image characteristics (scene balance) and to indicate how the image has been captured and digitized, rather than tailor the stored image file for playback on a particular reproduction device. Further adjustment of parameters of the reproduced image is left to the user. Thus, where the reproduction device is a consumer television monitor, the customer/user may selectively customize the manner in which an image file is displayed by the operation of a player/display control unit (e.g. hand-held IR transmitter) which drives video display software resident in the player. Indeed, from a practical standpoint, it can be expected that in any given roll of film, there will be one or more pictures that a user may find less than interesting or may wish to modify (e.g. enlarge, crop) to a preferred presentation.
In audio playback systems, in order to accommodate the storage of preference settings for selected song files, some CD players may be equipped with an auxiliary internal memory through which a user may specify a list of favorite songs to be sequenced on playback, rather than having the player access all of the audio files in the order in which they have been recorded While such an auxiliary `preferred sequence` feature would also be useful in an image playback device, its functionality is limited and the preference data itself is confined to that user's CD player. As a result, if the user wishes to display or otherwise reproduce a customized image or set of images on another player, the user will have to go through the repeat exercise of setting up the display parameters on that player.
Because a color image effectively consists of an extremely large set of parallel information sources, whereas the contents of a sound track are confined to one or two serially presented waveforms, the degree of freedom associated with the modification of a digital color image provides the user with practically an infinite number of possible alternative appearances for the base image file, so that customization of even a single image may involve both creativity and the expenditure of a non-insubstantial period of time. Thus, it can be expected that the user will want to save these parameters not only for future display of a customized image on the very TV monitor that has been used to customize one or more images stored on the disc, but for future playback on another CD player, for example, that belonging to a relative or neighbor. As mentioned previously, however, the data base on which the digitized image has been stored is unalterable, so that image customization data cannot simply be appended to the associated image file on the optical compact disc.
In addition to the problem of customized data confinement, the CD player resident memory has a finite storage capacity. As a consequence, regardless of the fact that it permits the user to store customized parameter data, eventually, the CD player's auxiliary internal memory will run out of display parameter storage space.